The Sensual God: How the Senses Make the Almighty Senseless

THE SENSUAL GOD

THE SENSUAL GOD

HOW THE SENSES MAKE

THE ALMIGHTY SENSELESS

Aviad Kleinberg

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS         NEW YORK

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54024-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kleinberg, Aviad M.

The sensual God : how the senses make the almighty senseless / Aviad Kleinberg.

pages   cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-17470-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-54024-7 (ebook)

1. God I. Title.

BL473.K54 2015

211—dc23

2015002483

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at cup-ebook@columbia.edu.

COVER DESIGN: Mary Ann Smith

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

Instability and Its Discontents

CHAPTER 2

Loving God Like a Cow

CHAPTER 3

Endless

CHAPTER 4

Credo

CHAPTER 5

Unimaginable: A Short Digression

CHAPTER 6

Impossible

CHAPTER 7

A Short Discourse on the Spiritual Senses

CHAPTER 8

Invisible

CHAPTER 9

Tasteless

CHAPTER 10

Untouchable

CHAPTER 11

Inaudible

CHAPTER 12

Scentless

Post Scriptum

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Work on this book began at the library of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto, where I enjoyed the hospitality of my dear friends Maruja and Hal Jackman. It continued in Paris at the library of the Institut d’Études Augustiniennes, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in Oxford at the Bodleian Library and in my hometown, Tel Aviv. Friends and colleagues read the manuscript or parts of it. Karma Ben Johanan, Brian Stock, Joe Goering, Isahai Rosen Zvi, Tamar Herzig, Maruja Jackman and Francoise Meltzer offered comments, corrections and encouragement. I am deeply grateful to them all.

INTRODUCTION

When I tell people about this book, they often want to know whether I believe in God. I say I don’t. Why then, they wonder, do I dedicate so much time and effort to issues that few nonbelievers today find relevant? In fact, they say, it is far from certain that even believers find theology all that relevant. One can be a perfectly good Christian, or Jew, or Muslim, with very little theological knowledge, and one can know a lot of theology and have very little faith.

I must add furthermore that there was nothing natural about my choice of subject. I am the son of Holocaust survivors for whom disbelief in a God of justice is a moral duty. I grew up in a secular home and in a secular state. Interest in Christianity was frowned upon. In the Israel in which I grew up, showing sympathy for Christian ideas smacked of unfaithfulness, not to the God of our fathers, but to a ghostly throng of slain and persecuted ancestors. And yet I was, and still am, strongly attracted to these texts, to their concerns and ideals, to their endless dialogue with a being in whom I do not believe.

Why? Probably because of the questions. Religions ask big questions. Why are we here? What is the meaning of our existence? Why do humans suffer? Why are humans worthy, or unworthy, of salvation? Who is responsible for the way things are? Religious texts are unabashedly engrossed in the sublime. In my fashion so am I. Religious thinkers take existence seriously, treat it as a matter of life and death, invest great talent and great passion in it. I find such concerns and such emotional attitudes strongly appealing, philosophically, morally, and even aesthetically.

But while I am impressed by the questions, I am less impressed by the answers. Perhaps I am too Cartesian, as the French would say, too linear in my thinking. I see loopholes, fallacies, logical shortcuts, and petitiones principii where straight logical lines should have been drawn between premise and conclusion. But as long as I’m allowed to get off before the final conclusions are reached, I enjoy the ride. Perhaps enjoy does not fully capture it; I’m often entranced by the process. I use the term advisedly. My deepest spiritual experiences have occurred while reading (and sometimes thinking about) religious matters. Unfettered by the unkind rules of strict logic, the religious ride through the big questions is wilder, bolder, more imaginative than any philosophical investigation of the same issues. Like all straight thinkers, I am taken by the boldness and beauty of the crooked line.

But is this a fair depiction of religious thought? What is so crooked about the thinking of great minds like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides and Nicholas of Cusa? In its own terms, nothing of course. These are not only great thinkers but first-rate logicians capable of detecting a logical fallacy no less than any nonreligious thinker. The problem, naturally, is the hand that these great minds were dealt: it included many a wild card—mythology; dogmata born of historical political compromises, phrased by unskilled theologians; and powerful believers too attached to their weird beliefs. That with these materials the Catholic Church (who started with the worst philosophical hand) has succeeded in forming such an impressive edifice is no less than miraculous. Alas, impressive as it is, it does not hold water—at least not the unholy water that rationalists are willing to drink.

But then my interest in religion is not merely a predilection for crooked lines, combined with an intellectual commitment to straight ones. It is not (just) about me. Because religious thinking is amphibian (at least in the West, it is truly committed to both rational and irrational premises), it allows us a glimpse at the moment of passing from one logical sphere to another. And it is an exceptionally interesting moment. It would have been much simpler to hold on to one set of logical rules: either remove everything irrational as all scientific postreligious thinkers do, or cling to religious articles of faith quia absurdum. Religious rationalists have chosen to live with irreconcilables. The idea that these irreconcilables should be reconciled was formulated quite early in the Catholic Church: faith seeking understanding, as St. Anselm put it (though the idea is much older, of course). But what I find particularly interesting are not the many moments when the reconciliation was successful, but the moments when it was not, the moments when contradictions could not be reconciled and yet were impossible to abandon, when great ingenuity was required to keep the volatile mixture of religious and philosophical ideas from exploding. Such breaking points, points that stretch to the limit the conceptual muscles of religious thinkers, tell us something important not only about the religious mind, but about the human mind in general. They teach us about the complexity, the ingenuity, and at times the self-inflicted blindness of human thought. These are the moments that this book explores.

One could find them in all areas of religious discourse. In this book, I have chosen to focus on one of the hardest-to-solve dilemmas of faith in search of understanding—the sensuality of God. How can the ineffable God, the Being so totally different from anything we can think or imagine be described by Sacred Scriptures in such sensual terms? I have chosen moments when the temptation to be either aquatic or terrestrial was greatest.

My examples come from both Christian and Jewish traditions (using sources from within the historical time frame I feel more or less comfortable with, from late antiquity to the eve of the Protestant Reformation). One should remember that there is no symmetry between the two traditions. While philosophy influenced some Jewish thinkers (most notably Maimonides and his followers), it was, and is, marginal in Judaism. Judaism during the last two millennia has been led by jurists, experts in halacha, who sometimes engaged in mysticism (typically unsystematic). They either ignored many of the most acute theological problems that beset the minds of Christians, or offered them solutions that no systematic theologian would find satisfactory. As a cultural phenomenon, the moments of hermeneutical crisis that this book explores are more typical of Christianity than of Judaism. It is not that one cannot find equivalents to most of the issues in both religious cultures. But such equivalentism would give Jewish philosophers a much greater weight than they have ever possessed in their own tradition. The book, then, is unbalanced. More space is dedicated to Christian thinkers for whom philosophical problems are more troubling than for their Jewish counterparts. But Jewish thinkers were not immune to theological anxieties, and when they arise in their midst, their solutions could be quite different from Christian ones.

Finally, I did not try to trace the full spectrum of attitudes toward the various ways in which one can talk about God in sensual terms. Emptying the sea with a spoon, as the little boy from the famous legend of St. Augustine was trying to do, would require more time and more faith than I have.

CHAPTER ONE

Instability and Its Discontents

Everything moves. I’m not sure when I first realized this. It probably happened when I was eight and got my first wristwatch, or at least that is how I remember it. My parents took me on a trip to Switzerland. When we stopped in Lucerne, they decided that I was responsible enough to get my own timepiece. Watches were fairly expensive at the time. Most of my buddies did not own one. I was rather pleased with it. It was an elegant little thing. I was even more pleased with myself. I had every intention of showing off my new prize when we returned home. But then it happened. As I was proudly gazing at my watch, it suddenly dawned on me: things move. As the second hand was making its rounds, time was passing. The circular movement of the thin strip of metal in my shiny new toy was part of a momentous linear movement that I was somehow part of. We were all part of it—my sister, my parents, the people in the bus, the whole town with its streets, with its parks and trees and monuments. Lake Lucerne was part of it too, as were Switzerland and Israel. All the things that looked stable and immobile to me a minute before were part of a huge movement. All things that moved in their own direction were at the same time being herded by some invisible hand along a single path, the path that my watch measured in seconds, minutes, and hours. It was a continuous, inescapable motion that I suddenly became aware of.

In book 11 (chapter 17) of his Confessions, Augustine claims that time is self-evident until we try to give it a formal definition. It is only when we start questioning the self-evident, that our naïve confidence is shattered. In my watch-less state, time did not bother me at all. It had a semantic existence that barley scratched the surface of my mind. Even when I became aware of the existence of time, I was not really concerned with definitions. The only thing that bothered me was the implications of time on me, on us. What, in other words, did it mean to live in a world governed by time? I assumed without question the objectivity, the ontological reality, of mechanical time. Not for a moment did I ask myself what exactly it was that clocks were measuring, nor did I pay much attention to the possibility that mechanical time was artificial (in contrast with the natural time of the movement of the earth and the planets). I took it for granted that time existed and that clocks were simply keeping record of it, just as cameras were recording things as they truly were. What I found absolutely devastating was the fact (I assumed it was a fact) that time moves in one direction only. And since we are all somehow implicated in its movement, each passing second signifies not just an external event, but also an intimate personal occurrence. These were my seconds, minutes, and hours that were passing as I was ogling my watch. Time was robbing me of my precious hours. At the age of eight, I was obviously not thinking about death or old age. It was simply the knowledge that whatever it was that I was doing (or not doing) was, from the moment the clock marked it, a fait accompli. What’s done is done. Too late now to do otherwise. The moment of open possibilities has passed. And even though I had no idea at the time who Auden was (But all the clocks in the city / Began to whirr and chime: ‘O let not Time deceive you, / You cannot conquer Time.’), I realized that the clocks were tolling all the time; they were tolling for me. Ah yes, I also had no idea who Donne was.

We are carved, thin layer after thin layer, by the butcher’s knife of time. In the end, we are gone and the carver alone is left, ever ready to perform his gruesome work on those next in line. The clock is a futile attempt to warn us—futile because nothing can be done but mourn, not the passing of time, but the passing of us.

But is the movement imposed on us from without? Is it time that assaults us with its carving knife, or are the clocks merely our metronomes, ticking the tempo of the inner motions of our self-destruction? We are constantly moving from within, I came to realize. It was not just the blood rushing through our veins, the complex chemical reactions in our digestive system, the storm of electric activity in our brains, and the pumping of air in and out of our lungs. In school, they showed us how under the microscope our bodies teem with life (bacteria, fungi, viruses), and that the food we eat and the water we drink are alive.

We are changing all the time. Our bodies are not the solid blocks of matter that I imagined them to be. And the movements within us, I realized, were not regular and circular, but erratic and linear. Time was not the perpetrator, but an innocent observer. Heraclitus was wrong. The river of time is constant and regular. Every second is exactly the same as every other second. The reason we cannot step into the same river twice is that we are never the same. With time, I became a follower of Parmenides without realizing it. The child never dies, just as the old man is never born. At any moment, we are exactly one moment old. We grow old by creating ourselves in our own image and likeness.

But the image and likeness of what exactly? As we move blindly toward the future, our past is constantly growing. In retrospect, we might detect patterns: we seem to do certain things in certain ways. But who exactly are we? Where is the point of reference, the Archimedean lever with which to move our world? We need to stand still for a moment, but we can’t. Only the present really exists, argues the Bishop of Hippo: the past is no longer, the future not yet. But the present is fiendishly slippery. Blink your eyes and it’s gone. We simply have not got a foothold on which to be we.

All the hours of night and day add up to twenty-four. The first of them has the others in the future, the last has them in the past. Any hour between these has past hours before it, future hours after it. One hour is itself constituted of fugitive moments. Whatever part of it has flown away is past. What remains of it is future. That flicker of time which cannot be divided into shorter moments, that alone is what we can call present. And this time becomes past so quickly that it has no duration.¹

In the geometry of the soul, like in Euclidean plane geometry, the basic point of reference occupies no space. We jump from one point that has no extension whatsoever to the next, similarly lacking extension. We try to draw unbroken lines out of these spaceless fragments. Like the humans cut in two by Zeus in Aristophanes’s myth in the Symposium, the split I’s crave to be whole, thirst for continuity, want psychological extension. These, argues Augustine, are achieved by turning our fragmented consciousness into a reflective self. We somehow manage to squeeze into our rapidly vanishing self-consciousness of the present (contuitus) the memory of things past (memoria) and an expectation of the future (expectatio). Memory (as a possibly imaginary record of our physical and mental reality) is in Augustine’s view what shapes our identity, an identity that is historical and accumulative. The entire project of the Confessions is based on the assumption that we are who we remember we are. The answer to the sphinx’s question—who are you? Augustine would say—is not a definition (Man), but a story (I). We are the result of specific historical processes that have made us radically different from others, while sharing the same abstract (and to a large extent useless) common definition. Instead of writing an essay on human nature, Augustine tells in the Confessions his own story. Now that story—the events, feelings, and thoughts that have shaped him—depends on memoria. In book 10 of the Confessions, Augustine offers a lengthy discussion of memory as the storehouse of the soul:

Memory’s huge cavern, with its mysterious, secret, and indescribable nooks and crannies, receives all these perceptions, to be recalled when needed and reconsidered. Every one of them enters into memory, each by its own gate, and is put on deposit there. …

These actions are inward, in the vast hall of my memory. There sky, land and sea are available to me together with all the sensations I have been able to experience in them, except for those which I have forgotten. There also I meet myself and recall what I am, what I have done, and when and where and how I was affected when I did it. There is everything that I remember, whether I experienced it directly or believed the word of others. Out of the same abundance in store, I combine with past events images of various things, whether experienced directly or believed on the basis of what I have experienced; and on this basis I reason about future actions and events, and hopes, and again think of all these things in the present. I shall do this and that, I say to myself within that vast recess of my mind, which is full of many rich images, and this act or that follows. O that this or that were so May God avert this or that. I say these words to myself, and, as I speak, there are present images of everything I am speaking of, drawn out of the same treasure-house of memory; I would never say anything like that if these images were not present.²

But then who is this expecting and remembering self ? The remembering and expecting self starts anew with every reemergence of the elusive, spaceless present. What gives it the right to claim continuity, to seize the moment, to master the past and the future? Augustine, like Descartes more than a millennium later, conjures up God to be the Archimedean lever. However variable and incomprehensible the world may be, however rootless and senseless the conscious self (the Cartesian thinker), there is always God, the solid rock upon which all the rest can rest. We shall return to this presently, but before we do, we might look at a bolder answer to the problem of the self ‘s instability. It is hidden in Plato’s Symposium, in a discussion of the nature of love. Love, it turns out, has important psychological side effects.

The participants in the Symposium present a variety of opinions concerning the nature of Eros. As he usually does, Socrates offers a position that contradicts the views of the other speakers. For Socrates, Eros is not the object of desire but the force that can catapult us from the concrete and material to the abstract and spiritual. Socrates’s position is presented from the mouth of the wise woman Diotima. Diotima argues that Eros is not a static thing but a process, the inclination to generate and beget in beauty, because to the mortal creature, generation is a sort of eternity and immortality. It is within this context that Diotima speaks about the problem of the fragmented self:

Even while each living thing is said to be alive and to be the same—as a person is said to be the same from childhood till he turns to be an old man—even then he never consists of the same things, though he is called the same, but he is always being renewed and in other respects passing away, in his hair and flesh and bones and blood and his entire body. And it’s not just in his body, but in his soul too, for none of his manners, customs, opinions, desires, pains or fears ever remains the same, but some are coming to be in him